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The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (Hardcover)

By Geoff Dyer

$28.00

ISBN: 9780374605568

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Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - May 3rd, 2022

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Geoff Dyer, the author of always engaging books on all kinds of topics that never fit easily into a category or genre, returns with this study ostensibly on “late style.” His references and subjects range from tennis to Beethoven, from JMW Turner to Bob Dylan, from lecturing on Jazz at Burning Man to unsuccessfully taking DMT at Joshua Tree. The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings is built from small sections of prose usually no more than a page that follow a pattern of one topic gradually shifting into the next which might not outwardly seem connected until Dyer brilliantly makes his point clear. Structured along threads like tennis (both the pros and his own avid playing), Nietzsche, Philip Larkin’s poetry, the effects of Covid, Jazz, almost confrontationally “interdisciplinary,” The Last Days of Roger Federer offers a bounty of riches and meditations from one of our most talented critics. ~ Reviewed by Dafydd Wood

Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (Hardcover)

By Mary Beard

$35.00

ISBN: 9780691222363

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Published: Princeton University Press - October 12th, 2021

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The brilliant Mary Beard's Twelve Caesars examines both how autocratic rule was presented contemporaneously in the visual rhetoric of Ancient Rome (Julius Caesar was literally the first person to come up with putting a ruler's face on the coinage; each emperor exporting his visage in mass production throughout the empire) and how the images of Roman emperors have been consistently used from the Middle Ages to the present in not only art but also in more maligned genres like engraving, plateware, chair backing, political caricatures of a politician with lyre and flames in the background etc. Beard moves from the Roman biographer and gossip Suetonius and the ancient anonymous portrait busts of emperors and “emperors” to Medieval stained glass, from Titian & Rubens to the reception of particular works (a massive “imperial” sarcophagus in which Andrew Jackson refused to be buried), to the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Twelve Caesars is as much about Roman emperors as it is about the history and practice of identifying or misidentifying them, about how their iconography has lasted two millennia, and how they mean power. ~ Reviewed by Dafydd Wood

The Twilight World (Hardcover)

By Werner Herzog, Michael Hofmann (Translated by)

$25.00

ISBN: 9780593490266

Availability: Available for Pre-Order Now

Published: Penguin Press - June 14th, 2022

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Acclaimed director Werner Herzog’s debut novel takes as its subject a quintessentially Herzogian character–Hiroo Onoda. At the end of WWII in 1945, Onoda was ordered to defend a small island in the Philippines. He was in the jungle there for 29 years. Surreal, tragic, Onoda’s single-mindedness earns its place alongside Herzog’s other protagonists’ obsessions and long pyrrhic battles with “nature’s sublime indifference.” ~ Reviewed by Dafydd Wood